Gornal's Pig on the Wall Legend - some answers

Click to enlarge Who put the pig on the wall at Gornal to see the band go by. Was it Billy the Boy, Jimmy the Go, Clockweight, Billy on Tho'b, The Pokey Mon or Jacko, Tasso, Cogger, Blossom, Jackery? No, it was Johnny Longstomach Recently Mike Capewell sent us his copy of the famous spoof postcard that purports to depict a Gornal 'Urban Legend'. We couldn't understand why the final 'Johnny Longstomach' sentence was missing (as it is in Trevor Genge's Sedgley Selection book). Click here for the article we published on the subject. Many thanks to everyone who has helped us with this mystery. John Favill says that the information he sent to Ian Beach (with the Longstomach line) was culled from the Black Country Bugle Annual of 1980. John notes that the extra sentence uses lower case letters which was not technically possible at the time of Captain Webb and the Dawley original card. The Remington Mark II was not on the market until 1878, and John guesses that it would be many years before one would have been used in Gornal. Arthur Hale informed us that the Gornal spoof was carried out by noted local writer Archie Williams, which dates the card to much, much later than the Dawley one. This was confirmed by Mike Hammond, who sent in a letter on the subject published in the Bugle on the 29th November 2001. The letter was written by Archie's son Bryn, who puts the cat among the pigeons by dating Archie's prank to around 1970. As this means that there was a century between the Dawley and Gornal cards, further forensic work on early typewriter technology will not be necessary! We contacted Bryn today and he gave us the definitive answer to our original question: "No, it was Johnny Longstomach" was typed by Archie at the same time as the rest of the riddle - so it must have been removed later. This is easier to believe now that we know that some Victorian cut and paste pioneer wasn't responsible - but we still can't understand who would want to remove the sentence and why. Regarding the characters referred to by Archie, Bryn believes that Cogger was indeed Cogger Stevens of The Bucket Brigade. Barry Clarke tells us that Billy on Tho'b was licensee of The Sunshine before Barry's father Ernie Senior. Johnny Longstomach was a 6 foot 7 inch travelling grocer who liked a drink (see Sedgley Manor Pig page). And Jackery, according to Bryn, was the chap who led the famous Gornal Carnival parade from the football stadium at Garden Walk, banging his big bass drum. This still leaves a few other names to conjure with though - please email us at admin@yampy.co.uk if you have any further information.